[See intro notes to my first post for what’s going on here.]
Presenter: Shane Pearson, VP, Marketing and Product Management
I decided on this out of the other two available since RedMonk architect advisory council dude, Scott Mark, said the last thing from BEA they used was their portal stuff. I’ll let him chime in on how that went if he’d like.
The Problem
Info workers get pinged/sent a lot of stuff. Pain-point!
Provide business workers a unified view of all that info…[like IBM Workplace…]
Create documents in your tool of choice, publish them to portal/collab thing.
[?? Why not acquire something like Writely? Is it not your business to tackle the creation of info-work, just the “sending around” of it?]
Problems: Access to information, Application/Use of best practices and processes is loose, Auditing.
“BEA products address human-centric, System-Centric and Federated Processes.”
Human Complexity, Systems Complexity. The intersection of the two. If you combine being able to deal with those two, you can enforce best practices better.
BPM
AquaLogic BPM creates business model that’s the declarative contract for programers, etc.
Giving the user base ability to use more tools instead of just the “power users.”
…views in work space are defined by the role you have.
Ribs!
Use case: 2 weeks from now, Applebee’s is going to have a special on ribs, so the system helps drive the 14 things that must be done in prep for this rib sale. A regional manager can track people’s progress
[Is this just all project management for non programmers? A big, corporate to do list with auditing, tracking, multi-user notions, notifications, and reports? Would bascamp work just as well? What’s the diff? for what’s missing? Could basecamp run Applebee’s corporate to do list?]
Q: The Applebee’s case raises the question from some dude, how do you balance being infrastructure vs. services company?
A: we do composite applications, not applications.
“We are not going to be the world’s leading collaboration. But, we can make it easier to pull in [the artifacts from best of breed apps and…do something with them].” Act as a spanning layer across different vendor silos.
[The Digital In/Out Box]
[There’s been 2 or 3 screen shots of the WebLogic/Fuego BPM stuff, but not too much “how this actually gets used.” That’s the problem with talking to the “business problem” that technology solves instead of the technology itself. You end up spending all your time talking about business and how it’s done, and not too much on the technology itself, or thinking about how the technology can transform business. Then again, everyone might be sick of IT trying to transform business: they just want IT to be a fancy in and out box, with audit trails and reports. There’s a definition of enterprise software for ya. Nuthin’ that’ll get you action.]
Using the System
[After that…here comes the screenshots!]
“Desktop-like look and feel improves user adoption.”
“There’s an item in your queue that you’ve missed, and this is effecting your service level.”
The Future!
Project “Holland”
Single user exp. Give biz users the told the need social: every user is an active owner and participate. Flexible let each user contribute in their own way (each user gets a page).
Enterprise: secure (access control, change control, governance, analytics), scalable (clustering, remoting, intranet, extranet access), extensible (integrate existing enterprise systems).
Project “Graffiti”
Taking ideas of flickr and del.icio.us to allow users to add meta-data (tags) to content for self-org and references. Tracking links and pages people use.
Project “Runner”
Rapid application services. Composite applications/portlets…[?? is it JavaScript include, PHP, etc. based? How does that integrate in.]
SSO, role based security.
[Conclusions]
[Hmmm…seems like the current is the “gold” of targeting info-work as we know it, while the future is finally giving enterprises the consumer grade quality/features when it comes to online collab. The hollowed internet behind the firewall I’ve longed for over the past few years.]
Disclaimer: BEA is a client, and paid for me to come to this conference. IBM is also a client.
Cote’ – some portal thoughts here – more to come.